The present invention relates to internet search engines, and in particular, to internet search engines that use feedback to refine search results.
Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Currently, most software search engines use a method whereby a user enters in search query keywords into a computer. This search query is transmitted from the user's computer to the search engine's sever. On the search engine's server, a search engine's database resides. The user's search query is compared to the keywords in the search engine database. Any website URLs (uniform resource locators, or addresses) that are associated with these keywords are then transmitted from the search engine's database to the user's computer.
A current search engine's database of websites is updated via an automated program referred to as a “crawler” or “spider”. The crawler records the data and text on many websites on the internet and indexes (copies and stores) this information into the search engine's database. One problem with this approach is that after all the text on an entire web page has been recorded and inserted into the database, a user's keyword query can still produce an enormous amount of results. Many websites can be indexed under a keyword even if that particular keyword only shows up once on that website's entire web page. Therefore the user is faced with the task of going through all the resultant website addresses that are produced from his search query to find the one result that satisfies his informational hunt. Most search engines can have millions of results to a single keyword query. One problem with this type of search software is that the indexing of the websites is done solely by a software algorithm based on a strict set of criteria such as keyword popularity on a particular webpage.
Other enhanced search engines rank their search results based on the popularity of user based clicks on a particular search result uniform resource locator (URL). The search result URLs that have the most click-throughs from human users who have clicked that particular result are ranked first, and those websites that have the second number of click-throughs are ranked second, etc. One problem with this type of popularity ranking (based on URL click-throughs) is that users often are not showing their preference for a site based on their click-through to it, but rather are just clicking the search result URL that appears based on factors such as the rank on the page or the name of the website. Just because many users have clicked on a particular search result URL does not mean that website is actually meeting their particular informational needs. That user in fact has no idea as to the content of that particular web page and has to actually click through to see the content of the website, read it, and then determine whether that particular website has met that user's need.
Thus, there is a need for improved search engines. The present invention solves these and other problems by providing a search engine that includes user feedback.